As the Advanced LIGO Project geared up last summer, 27 undergraduates from around the world became full partners in one of the biggest, most complex physics experiment ever. Their contributions ranged from creating hardware and software for current use to helping design next-generation detectors.

The Caltech–Japan Internship Program was started in 1994. As interns, students collaborate on industrial projects with Japanese companies, usually living in company-owned dormitory housing. They are immersed in Japanese business culture while simultaneously honing their language skills.

In a new class called Design and Construction of Programmable Molecular Systems, students came together to study molecular programming, a young research field with huge potential for transforming all molecular sciences into information technology.

Caltech seniors Adam Jermyn and Charles Tschirhart have been named 2015 Hertz Fellowship winners. Selected from a pool of approximately 800 applicants, the awardees will receive up to five years of support for their graduate studies.

Caltech has been named as a host institution for the next phase of the Amgen Scholars Program. Funding from the Amgen Foundation will allow Caltech to provide hands-on laboratory experience to 20 undergraduate students each summer for the next four years.

Caltech junior Edward Fouad spent 10 weeks this summer as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program working in the lab of Aaron Parness, a group leader at JPL, where researchers are designing, prototyping, and refining technology for a device called a microspine gripper. Looking something like a robotic circular foot with many toes extending radially outward, such a gripper has the ability to grab onto a rocky surface and cling to it even when hanging upside down.

This summer, several undergraduate students at Caltech had the opportunity to help optimize a promising technique that can make tissues and organs—even entire organisms—transparent for study. As part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, these students worked in the lab of Viviana Gradinaru, where researchers are developing such so-called clearing techniques that make it possible to peer straight through normally opaque tissues rather than seeing them only as thinly sectioned slices that have been pieced back together.